


Kenobi's Shadow

by GermanChocolate



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Clan Kryze (Star Wars), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s05e16 The Lawless, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, Loss, Mandalorian Clans (Star Wars), Obi-Wan Kenobi Has PTSD, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, ObiTine Week 2020, POV Obi-Wan Kenobi, Planet Mandalore (Star Wars), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Light Side of the Force (Star Wars), Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28154616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GermanChocolate/pseuds/GermanChocolate
Summary: Following the death of Duchess Satine, Obi-Wan Kenobi must come to terms with his own trauma and sense of loss.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Satine Kryze
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	Kenobi's Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Greg Van Eekhout's short story "Kenobi's Shadow," published in the "Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark" anthology book, was disappointing to me. I particularly disliked how the story focused on Kenobi's rage following Satine's death; I felt that it was fairly clear that Obi-Wan felt immense pain and grief after that moment, that he was fighting a sense of a despair and hopelessness rather than his inner darkness. Because of this, I have chosen to write my own version of "Kenobi's Shadow"--a version I feel is truer to the character of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the love he had for Duchess Satine.

_There is no death; there is the Force._  
At least that’s what Obi-Wan Kenobi has been told.  
He can’t remember when exactly he’d heard it. He isn’t certain of how old he was, or who he first heard it from. That mantra, that string of eight words that are as familiar to him as his own heartbeat, has always seemed to be with him, as if he was birthed knowing it. Because they are more than the ending of the Jedi Code, the series of mantras every Jedi, from youngling to grand master, knows by heart.  
They are the ending, the middle, the beginning of his very existence.  
And yet now, as he is shuttled across the cityscape of Sundari by a squad of Mandalorian commandos, he feels as if he is encountering this phrase for the first time. The words, once comfortingly familiar, now seem foreign, alien. It is as if just now, after decades of repeating this phrase during morning meditations, he has been hit with the realization that he never understood what those words meant. Not truly.  
Until now.  
This is certainly not the first time he has encountered death or loss. Twelve years ago, he can still recall the moment when his master, Qui-Gon Jinn, was cut through with a crimson blade. He can remember the initial shock, the disbelief, the utterly surreal sense of this can’t be happening. And he can remember that sense of shock being replaced by something new—something foreign to him, and yet as familiar as his own shadow, as if this thing had followed him around since birth.   
He remembers being filled with rage.  
He had been angry before that moment. He’s had angry arguments with Qui-Gon, even as an adult—and Force knew he’d had more than a few heated moments when he had been master to Anakin. But never before had he experienced anger at that level. Never before had his field of vision been replaced with a curtain of scarlet. Never before had his body burned with the singular desire to hurt something, to break it apart and cause it pain.  
Never before had he been angry enough to kill.  
It was funny, but in that moment, he’d had no justification for his actions, of the way he had lashed out at his master’s murderer with singular, burning hatred. The rationalizing, the excuses, had come afterward. In the moment, face-to-face with the man who’d ended the life of the closest thing he’d ever had to a father, he’d had no time for thoughts of wrong or right, dark or light. There was only him, his enemy, and the blade he would use to cut him down.  
And he did cut down his enemy—in a way. He’d watched that man, the pathetic creature known as Darth Maul, tumble down a reactor shaft, his torso bisected cleanly from his lower half. Just as he would expect his own shadow banished from existence by an all-encompassing light, he’d thought—no, he had known, he’d just known—that that was the end of Darth Maul.   
But just like a shadow returns to life once there is something to stand in the way of the light, Darth Maul had seemingly returned from the dead, and had once again brought death to the world of Obi-Wan Kenobi.  
Maul had murdered the only woman Obi-Wan had ever loved.  
He had murdered Duchess Satine Kryze.  
Although the moment seems like an eternity ago, as if Obi-Wan has lived through an infinity since it happened, her death is also so fresh, so new, that he feels as if it happened a mere seconds before. As if it is still happening. In a way that Obi-Wan himself cannot understand, he is locked in the moment of her death, watching the blade plunge through her back again and again and again. And although he knows what will happen, has seen it ten or a hundred or a thousand times before, each death feels fresh, like he himself has been pierced by the blade that took Satine’s life.  
All he wants, in this moment, is to see something else. He wants to fantasize about cutting through Maul like he cut through Satine, wants to envision driving Maul’s ebony blade through his heart. He wants the scarlet curtain of rage, that force of darkness he felt within himself all those years ago on Naboo, to overtake him again. He even wants to feel fear, be afraid of what the commandos escorting him will do once they put him in his cell. He just wants to think about something, anything, other than watching her die.  
But the Jedi have taught him better than that. Since that fateful day on Naboo, since taking his revenge on Maul for the death of Qui-Gon Jinn, he has had twelve years of practice—twelve years of preparing to combat his rage, to face his fear. To him, these darker emotions, these shadowy sides of himself, are like raindrops falling from the heavens: they fall on him, touch his skin, and then they roll off.   
He knows how to let go.  
The only problem is that he doesn’t know how to cope with the emptiness he feels afterward.   
Although he has known death, known loss, before this moment, this time is somehow...different. With Qui-Gon, he lost a father figure, someone he’d grown to consider as family. And when he’d mourned for Qui-Gon, he’d mourned him as he might mourn a family member. But with Satine? He’d grown close to her, closer than he had to any other being. He’d shared things, had experiences with Satine that he never had with Qui-Gon—or even Anakin, for that matter. But their time together, the time when their relationship had woven them closer than he’d been to any other living being, had been so short in comparison to his time with Qui-Gon. And with Qui-Gon, there was never the factor of remorse; there were regrets, yes. There were what-ifs—what if Qui-Gon had lived to train Anakin? What if Qui-Gon was here now, guiding him? But with Satine, he isn’t so much mourning the what-ifs of a fully-realized relationship as he is mourning a relationship that could’ve been so much more.  
And what might they have been? That is the painful part for him; he doesn’t know. Perhaps he might have stayed on Mandalore, forgone the path of the Jedi for a life with her. Perhaps they might have rebuilt Mandalore together, worked to build a better world, a better future, for Satine’s people. Perhaps, after all that was done, they might have built their own world together; perhaps they might have had children, created a legacy that reflected all the best parts of each other. And perhaps they might have even grown old together, and watched their children find love and marriage and family before they both died peacefully, old and full of years.  
Perhaps.  
Or perhaps not. Perhaps Satine might have wanted him with her for a time, but what if they ever drifted apart? What if the love that had once burned like a fire, giving warmth and light to them both, went cold and dark? What if he had left the Order for her, only to find that they couldn’t stand each other in a few years’ time?  
So his pain, in this moment, boils down to this: he doesn’t know if he made the right choice. He doesn’t know if he ever has. Walking away from Satine all those years ago might have been a mistake. Not telling her how he truly felt on the Coronet, even after she’d confessed the depth of her feelings for him, might have been wrong. Coming to rescue her on Mandalore, playing right into Maul’s hands, might have been one of the most serious errors he has made in his entire life.  
Not telling her that he loved her, even as she was dying in his arms, might have been the worst mistake of all.  
As he watches Satine die in his arms, over and over and over again, he tries to rationalize his silence, tries to justify why he never said anything to her. Maybe he was too overcome with his own emotion, was too stricken to even speak. Or perhaps he was honoring her last words, taking them all in. But regardless of how he frames it, he knows that any justification he could offer is a lie.   
He could have said, “I love you.”  
He could have said, “And I will love you—always.”  
But he didn’t.  
And he has to live with this knowledge for the rest of his life.  
And the questions—he’ll always have those, too. He’ll forever be asking why—why didn’t he tell her he loved her? Why did he let her die never knowing for sure, never knowing if the love she’d felt so strongly for him was reciprocated—or if she’d simply loved him in vain?  
There was a moment, all those years ago on the Coronet, when he’d been close to telling her. When he’d almost let down his guard, his carefully constructed defenses of self-denial, and told her how he felt. He’d wanted to tell her how, on their first meeting, his heart had skipped a beat. He wanted her to know that after their first kiss, he’d felt something building within him—not simply the wild exhilaration of lust or the giddiness of new love, but something that felt familiar, felt right, as if she were the thing he’d been searching for all his life. He wanted to tell her how being in her arms felt like home, and how leaving her all those years ago had been a bitter wandering—like a weary sojourner aching for a place to belong.  
But then the moment, the almost magical seconds of connection between them, had ended. Turning away from him, Satine had seemed to be pulled away from him by an unseen force—by duty, by commitment. It was as if some string of fate that had woven them together, brought them to this moment of vulnerability and transparency, only to snap it apart at the last second.  
_There is no death; there is the Force._  
This, like so many things he has learned over the course of his Jedi training, now seems like a lie.  
It is a lie because there is death—he has seen it firsthand. He has seen how friendships, how love, how life itself can come to a sudden end. He has seen how something precious can be lost, let go of, stripped away—and he has felt, as he does in this moment, how terrible that loss can be.   
It doesn’t matter to him, in this moment, if death and loss is a natural part of life, as Yoda was so fond of saying. He does not care about any of the platitudes and mantras he has learned from the Jedi. He gives no thought to letting go, or to letting things pass out of his life—not because he is bitter against these principles, but because he feels as if there is no point in telling a man who has lost everything that he must lose more.   
In his heart of hearts, he knows this is wrong. This despair, this sudden bleakness that has taken hold of his soul, is not the way a Jedi ought to walk. It is the way that no being, regardless of creed, should take. This thing inside him, this hopelessness growing out of his grief like a gnarled and sickly branch, is just as destructive as the rage he felt all those years ago on Naboo. Perhaps even more so. At least the anger, the wrath, ended when he cut Maul in two; this despair, this total numbness toward life, is endless. It is as if he has been locked inside a tunnel with no way out, a night without moon or stars, an ocean with no shore in sight.  
He wants to find a way out. He wants to know how to hope again—or, at the very least, know that he still has the capacity to hope. But he doesn’t know if he can. It is as if the binders around his wrists, the armed men guarding him as they take him to the place Maul intends for him to rot, is a mere physical reflection of the sense of entrapment he feels inside.  
Eyes fixed straight ahead, staring through everything and seeing nothing, he tries to remember what it was like to be free—free of pain, of despair, of the crushing weight that now bears down on his spirit. On an intellectual level, he knows that with time, all things pass; pain lessens, hope returns, and the burden of living and losing becomes lighter. Nothing, not even the seemingly endless darkness of a starless night, lasts forever. As surely as the sun sets and night falls, the sun will rise and light will return to the world.  
But knowing is not the problem for him.  
He knows that pain is temporary. He knows that in time, all wounds will heal. And he knows that, just like he did all those years ago, when he was reeling from the death of Qui-Gon Jinn, that he will find a way to keep on living. It’s simply that he does not, in his heart of hearts, feel like any of this will happen. The pain seems eternal, the wounds unhealable, and he feels like he has no way to keep going. To move forward.  
To rise above.  
Letting out a shaky breath, he closes his eyes. All he sees is darkness. It is as if the impossible, the insurmountable, is surrounding him on all sides, creating a pit that has cut him off from the rest of the living world. A pit he is at the bottom of..  
A pit from which he feels helpless to save himself.  
As if to echo his inner despair, the transport carrying himself and the commandos reaches the loading dock of the detention center, and the commandos begin prodding him toward what will be his home for the time being. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows that someone will likely come to his rescue; Anakin knows he is on Mandalore, and will soon know that something is amiss when Obi-Wan has neither returned nor made attempts to contact him. He will probably remain here a few days, perhaps a week at most. And yet in his heart, in the body he can barely will forward, he cannot find the strength to anticipate rescue. All he can do, all he can manage to think of, is surviving the next moment, the next step, the next breath.  
So he turns to what he knows.  
He closes his eyes, repeating the words within the silence of his own thoughts.  
 _There is no emotion; there is peace._  
He opens his eyes. The commandos, large and hulking as a forest of shadowy trees, continue to prod him toward the detention center.   
_There is no ignorance; there is knowledge._  
He continues to stare forward as he walks, eyes unfocused, unblinking.  
 _There is no passion; there is serenity._  
He takes another step.  
 _There is no chaos; there is harmony._  
And another.  
 _There is no death—_  
And another—  
And then, like a lightning bolt hurled from the heavens, he sees a flash of light in the corner of his eye. At first he thinks it is a blaster bolt, that one of the commandos has fired at him, deciding to end his life right here and now. He braces himself—but then a heartbeat later he hears the characteristic twip of a sticky explosive past his left shoulder, and he whirls to see where the shot came from. So, too, do the commandos—and he although he can’t pinpoint where the shot came from, he can clearly see the tell-tale flashing of a sticky explosive on one of their shoulders.  
Acting instinctively, no longer bound by the heaviness that plagued him a few moments before, he strikes out with his leg, sending the commando with the sticky explosive to the far side of the loading dock. The explosive lets out a series of quickening beeps, and, still acting on instinct, Obi-Wan dives in the opposite direction. The rest of the commandos toward—a fraction of a second before the explosive goes off, vaporizing the unfortunate Mandalorian in a cloud of smoke and multi-colored flame.  
Before either he or the commandos can move, a figure seemingly drops down from the sky onto the loading dock, like one of the angels of Iego descending from above. There are quick flashes of movement—punches, dodges, slashes. It’s only when the figure is still enough and the smoke of the explosion has dissipated that he can see that the figure is a woman clad in Mandalorian armor. Her slender frame allowing her to move quickly as she strikes at the commandos, she seems to be everywhere at once—kicking, leaping, and then, suddenly, crouching a few meters away from him. She rises to her feet with ease, seeming not to give much notice as the final two commandos crash against a building behind her, erupting into a kaleidoscope of flaming colors and smoke.  
Obi-Wan, lying flat on his back on the loading deck, can only stare.  
For a moment that seems like an eternity, Obi-Wan lies there, wondering if what he just saw was real, or if this was just part of his mind’s attempt to cope with all that has happened to him this day. The surrealness of it comes, in part, from the fact that it happened so quickly; all in all, he estimates that it took a mere five seconds for this woman and the team of Mandalorians accompanying her to obliterate the commandos. But there is something else, a memory that now replaces the flashbacks of Satine’s death, that is almost a mirror to the scene that just unfolded before him.  
In this memory, he is much younger—only nineteen at the most, with a clean-shaven face and ginger hair without even a hint of gray. His eyes are focused, intent, clear; they have yet to see the things that now weigh down his soul, have yet to witness his darkest moments. He is, for lack of a better term, in his prime.  
Amidst the ashen ruins of what was once the Mandalorian capital of Sundari, the younger version of himself lands neatly on a pile of precariously balanced rubble, lightsaber ignited in his hand. A group of three Mandalorian warriors, all insurgents opposing Mandalore’s current regime, whirl to face him. But they aren’t quite fast enough; moving with an ease and grace that his current self only wishes he still possessed, Obi-Wan sends all of them careening into a ravine of rubble and debris with a few well-placed kicks and slashes. Without jetpacks, they land hard—hard enough that Obi-Wan can hear a cacophony of cracks that might have very well been the sound of fracturing bone.  
The only other person on the platform, a tall and slender woman who appears to be roughly the same age as himself, gazes up at him. Although most other beings in her predicament would be frightened, in a state of shock, she appears calm, collected. Even regal. For even without her royal raiments, he can tell by the way she carries herself that she is a ruler—a woman born to lead her people.  
“Your timing is quite ideal.” Her voice is deep and rich, like the melody of an orchestra. “I take it you’re one of the envoys sent from the Republic?”  
Returning his lightsaber to his belt, he shakes his head. “Not quite, milady. We were sent here as protectors—a way to ensure your safety until the insurgency is no longer a threat.”  
“If you’re aware of the insurgency, you’re likely also aware that I asked for no such protection.”  
“I am. But your people don’t wish to see their new leader become a martyr in the first year of her rule.”  
She closes her eyes, sighs resignedly. “I will allow this—not because it is the wish of your Republic, but because it is the will of my people. If I am to be their voice, I must begin by heeding their voice.”  
Obi-Wan blinks. These were not the words of a mere politician. This was the heartspoken truth of a servant of the people—of a true leader, through and through.  
“And I also take it that you’re a Jedi Knight?” She nods to the lightsaber on his belt. “I had heard rumors that your Republic was sending them.”  
“Jedi apprentice. My master and I were sent, as I said, to act as your protectors.”  
“And your names?”  
“My master is Qui-Gon Jinn.” He gives her a small, yet graceful, bow. “I am Jedi padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi. I’ll be your personal bodyguard until the current crisis has been averted.”  
She gives her own little bow. “Duchess Satine Kryze.”   
And despite everything—despite the fact that she was very nearly killed a few moments ago, despite the fact that their current position most likely makes them vulnerable to attack—she draws closer to him, offers her hand for him to kiss. He kisses it softly, delicately—and although the moment doesn’t last long, he notes how smooth her skin is. A small part of him, the part of him that is more human than Jedi, wonders what it would be like to hold her hand in his, forever.   
She smiles softly, and for a reason he can’t identify at the moment, his heart feels as though it’s skipped a beat. “It’s good to make your acquaintance, padawan Kenobi.”  
“And yours. Now, if you’ll follow me…”  
And with that, Obi-Wan remembers leading her off to their ship—which, unbeknownst to him at the time, would be the first step in what would be a year-long adventure, full of twists and turns. There were more than a few moments of peril, moments when he was certain all hope was lost; the time they’d been cornered by bounty hunters on Bonagel, or when they’d been chased by venomites on Draboon. But there were also moments of joy, laughter—even love. There was their first kiss on Concord Dawn, the nights they’d spent on Shukut gazing up at the stars, the time they’d made love on her homeworld of Kalevala. There were so many moments, scattered in between all the pain and strife, that eclipsed the darker moments, made them seem insignificant by comparison.  
Now, as Obi-Wan lies on the loading deck, the similarity between his current circumstances and his memory of the past strike him as almost a kind of poetry. His rescue of Satine—a moment when he was the hero, the one to inspire hope—is a reverse parallel, a chiasmus of his current sense of defeat and despair. And the journey he’ll take after this moment, when he’s been rescued from this world—who’s to say that he won’t have adventures just as trying and wild and joyous as those he experienced with Satine? Why could he not find again those tiny sparks of love and light in the midst of pain?  
Why could he not find life again?  
 _There is no death; there is the Force._  
He sees it now, the truth in those words. Not truth in the most literal sense, for Yoda teachings are right; death is as much a part of life as the Force itself, and it would be dangerous to deny that reality. But if death means that something—a person’s being, a person’s will—vanishes forever, then there truly is no death in that sense of the word. Nothing, not even the slightest of hopes, is ever truly gone.  
There is no death.  
There is the Force, and all of the darkness and chaos and wild, reckless hope that comes from it.  
All of this, all of Obi-Wan’s memories, all of his reflections, take place in the space of a few moments. In that same space, the woman is walking toward him, plucking his lightsaber off the ground. Another stroke of good fortune for him; he feared Maul had taken it, but it must have been in the hands of one of the commandos. He takes this as his cue to scramble to his feet and meet the woman’s fiery green eyes. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”  
“I’m Bo-Katan,” she says. Confidently, as if she’s familiar with this type of weapon, the woman ignites his lightsaber and slices through the binders on his wrists. “I’m here to rescue you. That’s all you need to know.”  
Despite all that’s happened—all the pain he’s endured, all of the brokenness he carries within himself—he offers her the faintest of smiles. “Sounds good to me.”  
As she strips a jetpack off one of the fallen enemy commandos, he swears he can detect the hint of a smile from her as well. But he can’t be sure. Although her features are pleasing, her face has a hardness to it, the type of severity that doesn’t allow for many moments of levity.  
When she hefts the jetpack toward him, though, he can swear that she’s not only smiling, but that there’s something familiar about the way she smiles.  
“You ever use one of these before?” She asks this as she snaps the jetpack onto the backplate of his armor. He smiles, a little more warmly this time. And she, again, seems so oddly familiar to him.  
“No,” he admits. “But I’m a fast learner.”  
And with that, he and his rescuers take off, flying toward a sky still brimming with light.


End file.
